Communications and Services

The Communications and Services research group has a wide
ranging interest in service engineering across an array of network
technologies, including voice, home and data networks. Key interests
include service oriented architecture, service creation, and feature or service
interaction.

However the group also has a communications leaning,
for example P2P overlays and more recently their role
within mobile communications. The group has an interest
in the programmability of Wireless Sensor Networks and is investigating
this in wind farm and home care settings.

Often the focus of our work is on the control of networked
resources using software services. This includes the use of policies as
a means to control service behaviour in a more abstract and
user-oriented way. The group has experience with services controlling:

Current and Recent Visitors

Current and Recent Projects

ACCENT
(Advanced Call Control Enhancing Network Technologies), September 2001 -
March 2005, Mitel Networks Corp. and EPSRC (GR/R31263).
This project investigated the use of policies for call
processing, particularly for Internet telephony. It developed a call
control language for defining user policies, for analysing conflicts in
these, and for supporting policies in an operational environment.

ACCESS
(Adapting Call Control-Enabled SoftSwitches), March 2003 - March 2005,
TTI (TCS, grant 4132) and edNET.
Work in this project focused on call control for
softswitches. It aimed to enhance Voice over IP (Internet Telephony)
call control functions within the Vocal Vovida implementation, and to
add further call control services to Vocal.

CAPP
(Controlling Appliances with Pen and Paper)
This project investigates the use of digital Pen and Paper
(using Anoto technology) to
control Networked Appliances. The project aims to integrate the Pen and
Paper interface with an OSGi
(Open Services Gateway Initiative) gateway.

DAMES (Data Management for
e-Social Science) is a project between the group, the
Department of Applied
Social Science, and The University of Glasgow. The group is
addressing Grid Enabled Specialist Data Environments
to provide access to specialist data on occupations, on educational
qualifications, and on ethnicity.

Feature Interaction Handling between Services controlling
Networked Appliances. This project is developing an approach to handle
feature interactions between services controlling networked household
appliances. Key to the approach is that service interactions are caused
not only by communications over a network, but also via changes of
environmental aspects, such as movement, temperature and noise. The
approach is implemented
on an OSGi
(Open Services Gateway Initiative) gateway controlling
X.10 and UPnP appliances.

GEODE
(Grid Enabled Occupational Data Environment),
October 2005 - March 2007, ESRC.
The GEODE project studied the technologies behind
the handling of ‘occupational information’ within
the social science research community. Occupational information refers
to summary statistics and data which are associated with particular
occupational positions. Such information is used by many social
research projects, but is not always available in an easily accessible form.
The GEODE project used ‘eScience’
and ‘Grid’ technologies to facilitate access to
occupational information. These technologies involve a particular form
of (newly emerging) computing resource – indeed, a wider
intention of the project is to develop and promote these technologies
as examples of ‘eSocial Science’. This aspect of
the project involved collaborations with the UK's National e-Science
Centre and with the ESRC's National Centre for eSocial Science.

InterLife
(ESRC grant ES/F042116/1,
December 2008 - November 2011).
This project is developing support environments based upon
Second Life.
The InterLife project will focus on supporting children
and young adults in developing skills to manage the risks and threats
encountered during Educational and Social transitions. This will be
achieved through a mobile virtual environment called InterLife which
will be developed from and beyond the popular Second Life virtual
world. A significant feature of the environment will be the ability to
interact with and between real and virtual communities, enabled by the
design of a distinctive communication architecture. Communication
devices can be both real and virtual. InterLife will provide
reflective and personal development tools to be used collaboratively
within an avatar-based (customisable virtual persona) environment.
This work is a collaboration between the group and the
Education Facility
at the University of Glasgow.

MATCH
(Mobilising Advanced Technologies for Care at Home), November 2005 -
October 2009, SFC (Scottish Funding Council - HR04016).
MATCH is a collaborative research project focused on
technologies for care at home.
The project has specialised expertise in:

home care networks

lifestyle monitoring

speech communication

assistive technology (devices for disabilities).

The project is a collaboration among the Universities of
Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Stirling (lead partner) as well as
11 external partners.

PAM
(Personalised Ambient Monitoring; EPSRC grant EP/F003684/1, October 2007 - September 2010.)
The PAM project is investigating the use
of sensor based systems to reduce the incidence of debilitating
episodes for the mentality ill. The focus will be to help within the
home and the community. The project started in late 2007 and will run
for three years.
This work builds on existing work in
rule-based Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) carried out by the
group. The work is in collaboration with The University of
Southampton's Institute of Sound and Vibration Research
(ISVR),
its Centre for Operational Research, Management Science and
Information Systems
(CORMSIS),
and The University of Nottingham.
The investigators provide
skills and experience across medical devices and sensors, medical
signal processing, communications and software services, and
Operational Research modelling. This mix is essential to the success of
the project, and provides an interesting and distinct interdisciplinary grouping.

PROSEN
(Networking of Distributed Sensors for Proactive Condition Monitoring
of Wind Turbines), October 2005 - November 2008, EPSRC C014804.
This project was a collaboration with the universities of Kent, Essex, Lancaster, and
Strathclyde. The project was also supported by external partners
Agilent, Insensys, ITI Energy, Macom Technologies, NEL, Scottish Power
and TES.
The major objectives of the project were:

to demonstrate practical methods that have the
potential to increase the mean time between failure of large-scale
sensor arrays

to facilitate re-configuration of the arrays to meet unexpected new needs

to make fundamental contributions to the emerging field of proactive system
management research.

Sysnet
are collaborating with the group in a KTP
(006698, April 2008 - October 2009).
This brings together the expertise in P2P (Peer to Peer) technologies of the
group, and the mobile phone experience of Sysnet.
The goal is to develop a P2P framework for mobile handsets, three sample
applications, and a toolkit to enable third parties to develop their
own applications.

Waiter there really is a computer in my soup and it's telephoning me!": Revealing invisible computers.
(Public Engagement Project; EPSRC grant EP/H047379/1, September 2010 - December 2011.). This project is a
collaboration with the School of Education at the
University of Glasgow, RSAMD,
and Glasgow Science Centre.
The goal is to produce a science show at the Glasgow Science Centre about innovations in computers and communications arising
from current research. In particular we want to describe the synergy between these technologies and sensors. The show will
combine interactive demonstrations with strong audience participation. Also, in collaboration with the Royal Scottish Academy
of Music and Drama (RSAMD), we will introduce a theatrical element to ensure an attractive event for audiences. Crucially the
show will be sustainable with delivery continuing beyond the project end date.
The proposed show will be under an hour long and held in the Science Show Theatre within the centre. It will be part of the
regular weekend and holiday science show programme held in the Science Show Theatre attended by thousands of visitors each year.
In addition the show will be integrated into the schools and community outreach programmes with appropriate educational materials
for both introductory and reinforcing post-show activity support packs.

Research Activities

Members of the research group work on a number of different aspects of communications
and services:

Service oriented Architecture with supporting theory, techniques, and
tools is of particular interest. The telecommunications world
has seen rapid changes due to
deregulation, internationalisation, distributed service provision, and
new multimedia services. Web and Grid services have become widespread.
Soundly-based, practical techniques and tools for engineering
services have thus become critical. With the support of several companies,
members of the group developed an architectural basis for
constructing a wide variety of services. The techniques and tools have been
proven using a range of voice and data services.

Service Creation research has
been carried by group members together with a
variety of telecommunications organisations across Europe.
Service creation traditionally was driven by the network operator.
However, with technologies such as Parlay, SIP (Voice over IP), Web/Grid
services and Networked Appliances, services will be created by a number
of different parties including the end user. Besides having experience
in the creation of traditional voice services, the group has extensive
experience in service creation approaches for multimedia services based
on the TINA architecture, Voice over IP architectures such as SIP and
H.323, VoiceXML, and Web/Grid services.

Feature Interaction Handling
is a particular research interest of the group. The group was the
first to study and classify the new kinds of
feature interactions that can arise in multimedia services.
Members of the group, together with Telcordia Technologies,
were first to analyse the problem of services controlling networked appliances.
The approaches developed to address the feature interaction problem include
those which can be applied during all stages of the service life
cycle and in a number of different target environments. The group has
developed filtering, off-line, run-time and hybrid approaches. Targeted
environments include traditional telephony, Voice over IP
environments (SIP), Interactive Voice Response, Networked Appliances,
and Web/Grid services.

Peer to Peer (P2P) is a growing area within the group.
P2P overlay networks
do not require central server components, unlike client-server systems.
P2P systems are self-managing, in that they can cope with nodes leaving
and joining at a high rate.
The group's focus has been on structured P2P overlay networks.
Structured P2P systems use a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) as a means to organise
nodes into a structure that assigns data items to particular nodes.
Structured P2P systems can be classified as either multi hop or
single hop. If more than one hop is required to send a message from
source to destination node, the system is referred to as a multi hop
system. However, as each link in the overlay network corresponds to
a path in the underlying IP network, this approach can result in poor latency.
With an alternative approach, the destination node can be reached
with a single hop. To do so, each node maintains a routing table
containing entries for all other nodes in the system. The improvement in
the latency for lookups is traded against an increased amount of maintenance traffic
keeping the routing tables in all the nodes up to date.
The group's focus has been on improving the performance of one hop
overlays by employing a multicast approach (XCAST). The group has also designed and
implemented a variable hop overlay (Chameleon) where nodes can adapt the algorithm
according to the bandwidth currently available.

Networked Appliances
Networked appliances are attracting increasing interest, and the first
selected products are now available. Networked appliances are dedicated
consumer devices which contain a network processor and are controlled
by software services. Particularly interesting is the control of
appliances using software services. Research has included devices
employing a variety of protocols for communication, e.g. UPnP
(Universal Plug and Play), X.10, and Jini. The most added value will be
gained through integration of appliances with various means of communication, such as
the WWW (World Wide Web) and telephony. The group has researched the
provisioning and integration of services on an OSGi (Open Services Gateway) platform.

Wireless Sensor Networks are an extremely active area. Our
focus is on the control and programmability of WSNs. For the former we
have developed a policy-based management system. For the latter we have
investigated different rule engines embedded within the network. More
recently we have also been combining a rule engine with mobile
phones and WSNs.

Virtual Worlds is a recent area of interest.
Our focus here is on linking multi-user 3-D virtual worlds such as Second
Life with real physical devices. We are not interested in
using these devices to provide small (and inadequate) windows into virtual worlds.
Rather we want to provide a persistent "connection" between the user
and in-world events. Hence we are developing an infrastructure
that allows events and information in-world to be displayed on real-devices.
We also aim to allow users to influence events in-world without logging on to
a conventional PC.

The group has achieved international and national standing. Results of
our work are frequently
published
in international conferences and scholarly journals and magazines.
Members of the group serve on program committees of major conferences
and act as editors for respected journals. For instance, the premier
international forum for feature interaction is the
International Conference on Feature Interactions in Software and Communications Systems
series of events.
The group has made significant contributions to these events, both in terms of
papers and organisation; the group co-chaired the May 2000 running of this series.
In recognition of the key role of telecommunications service engineering,
Stirling was responsible for the EPSRC engineering
network called FORCES (Forum for Creation and Engineering of Telecommunications
Services).
Stirling also leads the MATCH home care research collaboration between the Universities of
Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Stirling.